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On March 8, after me being with Ubisoft Massive for almost two years, The Division was officially released. I wanted to write something about that sooner, but is has been pretty busy before and after the launch of the game.

So here we are in June, where the game has been out for almost three months now and I had my two year anniversary just last week. It’s great to see how the game is doing now that it’s out in the wild, breaking all kinds of records and having players create video content and provide feedback.

Today marks an important moment for Vanguard Games and me personally. After working in secret for quite some time, our project Halo: Spartan Assault has finally been revealed.

Of course, I’m incredibly proud to be part of such a high-profile and important project. In short, it’s a top-down action shooter for touch-based devices, set in the Halo universe and taking place between Halo 3 and 4. To see more of the awesome visuals and action-packed gameplay, take a look at the announcement trailer.

DigIt is a game for mobile phones I made during the Game Design & Development course at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Before we actually made a working version, I had already used the game concept by itself to apply for that course. The finished game was well received and very much complete, but after the project was officially over I saw some opportunities to improve the game even further. That’s what this article is about.

So, before you continue, please take a look in my portfolio to see how DigIt works exactly. It’s been a while since we completed DigIt, but I thought the design notes I made then (while playing the game on my Nokia 7610) would make for an interesting article about hands-on game design. We’ll start off with the one change to the game mechanics and then review the interface to better support gameplay.